Notable Quotes: On reading, writing, editing, and the publishing industry

This is the first of another new category: Notable Quotes. Sometimes a turn of phrase really catches my fancy, and if I like it enough I write it down. Here’s a list of quotes I’ve found over the years that deal with reading, writing, editing, and the publishing industry.

“A classic is a book everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read.”

–Mark Twain

“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”

–Winston Churchill

“I know now that when a man finishes some important task, like writing a book, when the last word is written he wants to start over and do the job right.”

–James Michener

“It’s much better than working. You sit down and tell stories. It’s fun. I would say that 99% of journalists and 80% of all teachers want to be doing what I’m doing. And I’m going to say it’s difficult? No! They’re right. My great fear is that I’ll be caught out.”

–Bernard Cornwell

“I’m a writer. I write not only for a living, I write because I’m a writer.”

–Gary Jennings

“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”

–Robert A. Heinlein

“Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.”

–Russel Lynes

“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”

–T. S. Eliot

“My definition of a good editor is a man I think charming, who sends me large cheques, praises my work, my physical beauty, and my sexual prowess, and who has a stranglehold on the publisher and the bank.”

–John Cheever

“An editor should have a pimp for a brother so he’d have someone to look up to.”

–Gene Fowler

“The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.”

–George Bernard Shaw

“Everyone needs an editor.”

–Time Fonte

“You ask for the distinction between the terms ‘Editor’ and ‘Publisher’: An editor selects manuscripts; a publisher selects editors.”

— Max Schuster

“One of the signs of Napoleon’s greatness is the fact that he once had a publisher shot.”

–Siegfried Unseld

“Publishers are all cohorts of the devil; there must be a special hell for them somewhere.”

–Goethe

“I don’t believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.”

–Isaac Asimov (not just a science fiction writer, either. He holds the distinction of being the only author so far to have at least one work in every possibly category of the dewey decimal system.)

“If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I’d type a little faster.”

–Isaac Asimov

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”

–John Updike

“Has the son of a bitch every had an unpublished thought?”

–David Foster Wallace, criticizing John Updike

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

–G. K. Chesterton

“I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.”

“Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”

–Samuel Johnson

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

–H. G. Wells

“What no wife of a writer can understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out the window.”

–Burton Rascoe

“When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”

–Raymond Chandler

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

–Robert Frost

“I was never angry enough to be a musician, but I was brooding enough to be a poet.”

–Seana Hutton

“There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.”

–Robert Graves

“Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.”

–Robert Byrne

“If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.”

–Kingsley Amis

“Getting even is one reason for writing.”

–William Gass

“The virtue of books is to be readable.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.”

–Arab proverb

“Nullus est liber tam malus ut non aliqua parte prosit.” (There is no book so bad that it is not profitable in some part)

–Pliny the Younger

“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.”

–John Gardner

“This is not a book that should be tossed lightly aside. It should be hurled with great force.”

–Dorothy Parker

“It’s not the most intelligent job in the world, but I do have to know the letters.”

–Vanna White

“The only living man who could commit five grammatical errors in a single sentence is dead.”

–Poet e e cummings on the death of Warren G Harding

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

–Oscar Wilde

“In a thousand words I can have the Lord’s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?”

–Roy H. Williams

“Often while reading a book one feels the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colours.”

–Pablo Picasso

“The historian serves the truth of his subject. The novelist serves the truth of his tale. As a novelist, I have tools no historian should touch: I can manipulate time and space, extrapolate from the written record to invent dialogue and incident, create fictional characters to bring you close to the historical figures and fall back on my imagination when the research runs out.”

[…] to me that I haven’t done a Notable Quotes entry in a long while, despite the fact that my first attempt at the category has proven to be one of the most visited posts of my blog (thanks in no small part, […]